


Principles of Orchestration

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Academic Stress, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Classical Music, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Existentialism, F/M, Hopeless Romantics, Hopeless romantics fucken EVERYWHERE, I suppose you could call that a double happy ending dfhdsfskaj, Inspired by Music, Inspired by Real Events, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Musicians, Mutual Pining, Orchestra, Pining, Recreational Drug Use, Rehearsals, also they're American if that isn't clear, points for guessing ;), spend 10 minutes in a university music building and you'll someone crying in a hallway, the university type, this is straight-up my IRL university
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:37:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: There is a time in one's life in which the rehearsals will stop and the real world knocks on one's door to say "Hello, dear, I've arrived, and I'm due to whack your kneecaps off riiiiight aboutnow."But until then, there is a string quartet preparing for their final performance and a hell of a lot of feelings boiling to the surface in a very, very untimely fashion.This isn't what Sirius Black ever signed up for as a violin performance major.





	1. Mvt I - Moderato

**Author's Note:**

> I promised myself I was going to hold off on posting this until I had the whole thing written.
> 
> Clearly, I lied.
> 
> Many thanks to [jennandblitz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jennandblitz/pseuds/jennandblitz) for the lovely beta pass on this chapter <3
> 
> Please, _please_ let me know if this resonates with you. I was a composition major and had a hell of a time my final two semesters of school, fall especially, and I would love to know if I hit home with any of these feelings for you all out there ^^  
> Thank you for reading!

_ “Stringed instruments possess more ways of producing sound than any other orchestral group. They can pass, better than other instruments, from one shade of expression to another, the varieties being of an infinite number.” _

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, _ Principles of Orchestration _

—

There is a saying in the particular lexicon of smalltalk reserved for the time of year as fall is very obviously breaking into existence, Halloween just a couple weeks away despite the fact one can start to find cornucopia decorations at the drugstore and a few commercials are beginning to hawk green and red and eerie Santa Claus Is Coming—

“There’s something in the air.”

If one says this to any college student at this, the incoming crest of the fall semester, especially in said student’s final year of a bachelor’s degree, one might be met by an array of guttural sounds from over the edge of a 20-ounce coffee in the depths of the stacks at midnight that could maybe be translated by a very dedicated anthropologists into something along the lines of “Fuck off, I have a final exam in two weeks and if I don’t pass this course my ass is grass.”

If one says this to a music student in particular, one will likely be met with an outburst of emotion—tears, fury, elation (rare), or more than one of these at once. 

If one says this to James Potter, violin performance major with his heart set on marrying his fianceé of the last year-and-a-half the moment after graduating and likely doing nothing related to performance to make his daily bread—he would be fine with this reality, more than fine, “Lily is in marketing, you see! Creative direction, oh, she’s a genius,” strap in, sport, you’ve just promised away half an hour to listen to James moon on about how he’s eager to become a trophy husband—James Potter would probably smile and nod agreeably. “Yeah, sounds about right. It’s been a really beautiful couple of days, gotta love autumn. Have a good one!”

If one says this to Peter Pettigrew, music education major (viola concentration), the man with the best of intentions but unfortunately not a single foot in Fate’s favor for the sort of steel wills it takes to be an effective teacher, it is more than a given that Peter Pettigrew would furrow those straw-hat eyebrows of his and say, “It had better not be hay fever.”

If one decided to share this thought with Remus Lupin, cello performance major, the most likely of all current undergraduates to sail on to success without even blinking at graduate school—even though one wouldn’t know it with the way he shuts himself in those practice rooms, hour by hour (“That boy is a phenom but he needs friends, you see,” his professors will say softly over tea with one another in their cramped little office spaces, “he’s 21 going on 80, wouldn’t you say?”)—Remus Lupin would mostly likely fix you with a stare far older than his eyes have any right being (“It’s sort of spooky, you’re right,” Flitwick will mutter in agreement, “it’s as though he’s been to war and back over that damn cello”) and simply deadpan, “I hear it’s hayfever.” After which one will get a soundproofed door very soundly shut in their face before hearing muted strands of Elgar excerpts bleeding through its seams.

It will be heartrendingly gorgeous and make one think of home. One will wonder why this man is so worried about his future when it so obviously shines this intensely. 

If one mentioned this to Sirius O. Black—first chair in the school’s orchestra and  _ lord _ does the man know it, he’s fucked every wind player worth having and is now doubling back to the couple of double reeds who don’t quite hate him, after a flagrant and recent breakup with the more musical of the Prewett twins on a brief foray into choristers; Watch Out, Gentlemen—he might look up from his phone and raise one if those perfectly groomed eyebrows to say, “Yeah? You should let James know.” Or, on this particular day, a day in which everything seems determined to crawl into his tightest space and itch like the plague until he wants to fucking  _ scream _ —looming juries, a cankerous mother who has recently sent him an icy email he wishes was still marked Unread asking whether or not she should expect Sirius for Thanksgiving this year even though they both know the answer to that (a size-48 and bolded Absolutely fucking not), and to top it all off Gideon’s singing crew of idiots keeps glaring at him when they pass on campus, honestly  _ fuck off _ —Sirius glares at the barista who probably doesn’t deserve such ire after such a chipper pronouncement of the bite in wind lately, or the general anticipation of break between the semesters.

The young woman’s expression shifts under her visor as Sirius takes the herbal tea from her across the bartop, and he tries to quash the internal rise of his father’s aspect with the addition of two crumpled dollar bills into the unburdened tip jar for his three-dollar peppermint tea. 

“Pretty sure it’s hayfever,” Sirius sneers before he can stop it. He shoulders his way out of the shop just down the block from the music building before he can make anyone else look at him as though he’s just scraped off his boot sole on their knee. Sirius sips from his tea and hisses when he burns the roof of his mouth. His violin case jostles along with the clip of his walk as if to laugh at him. 

Yes. It is certainly that time of year. There is  _ certainly _ something in the air. 

—

The current stakes:

Fall semester, senior year. The final ensemble requirement, the quartet these men have had since freshman year—miraculously, none of them have switched majors or dropped out since. All set to graduate on time, all facing the abstract mortality of The Real World (trademark pending) at the same speed, if yet with slightly offset trajectories. 

James needs only to pass—no flying colors necessary—so he and Lily can abscond to wherever it is her growing pile of job offers might take them: New York, Los Angeles, DC, perhaps London, wouldn’t  _ that _ be an adventure. He is Violin II, patience embodied at the head of this cabal of gentlemen, or at least that’s what his once-monthly wellness therapist at the student union tells him to repeat to himself as the semester mounts and he has to count his breathing to ten instead of eight to keep calm sometimes. 

Peter is squeezing in all of his final requirements before completing his student teaching in the spring, backwards planning at odds with most of the other senior educators but when has Peter Pettigrew ever done anything the easy way? He reads alto clef, for God’s sake. This ensemble credit will make or break his fall grade point, which he would prefer to keep as high as possible, as his only other gen-eds are laughably easy—a pale literature class taught by a man who might be two-thirds vole, and a theatre credit that fulfills his Human Behavior requirement as it focuses chiefly on monologuing. 

Sirius has been doing his best to ignore his talents from the dangerous end of cigarettes and sordid oral sex since he turned 20 his sophomore year, could quit calling himself a teenager, and could finally start filling the open place in his heart that he knows is perfectly Remus-shaped but hurts like an absolute bitch to acknowledge. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to do come May, doesn’t quite care to look at it too closely lest it rear up and spit acid in his eyes. He’s been ignoring the approaching sense of aimlessness quite well up until now, thanks unkindly, and he isn’t about to start paying it any mind even as they run through the Myaskovsky and he nails it every time but something is  _ still fucking missing _ . He will drown in somebody new every weekend and keep giving Gideon the cold shoulder while always meeting him somewhere for a quick lay for as long as it takes to quiet the racketing in his heart. 

In addition to unknowingly keeping Sirius’ soul alight and aching in the small hours of the night, Remus has an overfilled schedule of classes this fall and a full calendar of auditions slated all over even the emptiest little crags of the US. He is taking the same senior thesis course as James, and he has also been in love with Sirius Black since hearing him perfectly pronounce Camille Saint-Saëns’ name in string pedagogy class on the first day of freshman year. But he won’t buckle to a silly crush after three years of ignoring it, especially with only one semester left ahead of them in which they’ll both be reliably in the same place. 

He won’t.

He  _ won’t, _ stop looking at him like that. 

—

“Yo.” Sirius sweeps into the classroom like a gale, tea gone lukewarm even just through the couple of blocks’ walk thanks to this particularly bitter autumn evening, faced with James and Remus already unpacking their instruments and settling their music. They both look over their shoulders at him as Sirius balances his cup on the shitty desk across from the piano. “Good week so far?”

James makes a grumbly sound in his throat. It’s Wednesday. “Debatable. Kettleburn is making us do Schenker analysis on a Pixies album.” Kettleburn, theory professor extraordinaire, Sirius’ favorite in the college chiefly for the man’s propensity toward ranting about identity politics while letting Sirius bum a cigarette on the steps outside the music building; his preference for women has always been just a bit of an unfortunate thorn in Sirius’ ego. 

“Why do you say that like a bad thing? I’d rather the Pixies than Morton fucking Feldman.” Sirius snaps open his case and examines his bow without looking at James, squinting at the hairs and tightening the screw with exacting flicks. James has the taste of someone trapped in 1976, but not even the good kind—the man listens to Paul Anka, for Chrissake—and doesn’t realize a good thing when he’s got it (except Lily, the reality of whom still floors Sirius sometimes). Sirius, on the other hand, is trapped in a 20th-century synthesis course. He fucking  _ hates _ 20th-century synthesis. His advisor suggested it. He shouldn’t have listened. 

“Hey, Morton Feldman is important,” Remus says from his seat, their loose semicircle of chairs set up and waiting, as he loops his endpin anchor around the leg of his chair and settles his cello back against his open thigh. He doesn’t sound exactly intent about it, more so amused, and Sirius ignores a pleasant flutter in his belly at the tone of it. He’s been paying too much attention to timbre of people’s voices these days, spending too much time listening to Gideon talk when he’s trying to simply focus on perfunctory fucking. Remus is a tenor, or would be if he didn’t frown ever so slightly at vocal music. “ _ Silver Apples _ , etcetera etcetera.”

“Who the fuck are you, Severus?” James snorts. The back of Sirius’ mind lights up with visions of the unpretty composition student sneering at him from the belly of the basement practice rooms when Sirius deigns to practice something, surrounded by the school’s bank of analog boxes and tape machines and—Remus chuckles himself. Sirius puts out all thoughts of greasy hair and thin lips, fixating briefly instead on the fact that Remus is the type of person who actually says things like  _ etcetera etcetera _ out loud, as he wipes his violin down with a silk cloth and lifts it from its case.

“Let’s all be grateful he isn’t.” Sirius hooks his chin over the edge of his instrument—fuck a shoulder rest, Sirius might not practice very often but he knows to how to uphold the romance of a violin and a rest is decidedly not included in that equation—and looks over to Remus. “Give me A?”

Remus hands him a slightly tired little stare that still wriggles its warm way into the gaps of Sirius’ joints before pursing his lips to bear a bright little whistle. 440 Hertz rings out, bell-clear, and Sirius winks his thanks at Remus while he sets to tuning. He doesn’t imagine the faint pink that rises around Remus’ ears at that, has been goading the poor man since they were freshmen, but Sirius doesn’t let himself acknowledge what the truth of it does to his heart. All of Sirius Black’s bravado and snark and posturing stops dead at the intersection of Truth and Remus Fucking Lupin, but nobody else has to know that.

Sirius finishes tuning and Peter clatters in not five minutes later, backpack half-open and crammed full of papers. He nearly upends Sirius’ tea with his own latte. None of this is new.

The four of them settle, all disparate energies rattling together in whatever strange magic makes them, somehow, resonate as one unit after enough rehearsing—Sirius, James, Peter, Remus, clockwise from the left, a compact archway of strings and spruce and maple and breath—to ready for one last go around in just a couple months.

—

Myaskovsky’s String Quartet No.13 in A Minor is a maddening piece of music to Sirius in particular, if only for the fact that it opens with a phrase in the cello so achingly sweet that it almost hurts to hear it come from Remus’ instrument. The first time the four of them had read through the piece, Sirius had missed his entrance into their pseudo-duet to continue the opening theme. But that’s neither here nor there.

Composed in 1950, String Quartet No.13 was the final piece of music penned by Nikolai Myaskovsky—a man closely associated with but often overshadowed by the dour, beautiful, stunning legacy of Dmitri Shostakovich. He and his lot were consistently accused in the late 1940’s of writing anti-Soviet music, which some denied and others embraced but all were certainly doing in the unique way that art communicates resistance; the special little “Fuck You”s sewn into things that cannot exist where hate is planted, the twinklings of hope amid the ashes of disaster, whether they be something one sees or watches or hears. Nevertheless, Myaskovsky died of cancer in late 1950 and, while lauded as the leading Soviet composer with regards to sonata form, has had quite a middlingly-fine run of attention since then amid string players—again, Shostakovich. Soviets. Etcetera ectcetera.

The quartet was assigned to play No.13 for their final semester by their ensemble professor, Minerva McGonagall; maven of the Philadelphia Orchestra since the Ormandy-Muti days, and ever with a soft spot of relatability for James Potter as their resident Violin II.  _ It’s fitting, _ she had told them, crowded into her little office, thumbing individually through sheets of music and parts still warm from the rattly xerox machine by the window. Sirius had only just reached the peak of his business with Gideon at that point and hadn’t been able to concentrate on scanning the piece for the buzz in his pocket that was most certainly a photo of questionable morals sliding into his inbox.  _ It was Myaskovsky’s final piece of music, and this will be your final semester in this ensemble. _

_ He doesn’t lean on violin I as much as Prokofiev, that’s refreshing, _ Pete had kipped from a few seats down from Sirius, eyes already on the third movement. James laughed openly as Sirius reached around to try and rib Pete from where he sat. Minerva and Remus had only smirked, and perhaps that was the real rub of it all.

At the end of the day, it’s their last rotation around the tiny solar formation of this constant of theirs, this cabal of camaraderie amid the chaos and tumble of university at large. 

Sirius still can’t tell whether or not that’s a relief or the most catastrophic tragedy he’s ever been served.

—

“Jesus, Sirius, leave a little room for the rest of us,” James mutters, stopped again at the last full statement of the fugue in movement 1. They’ve run through the piece in full and have doubled back to spot-rehearse some of the thornier parts, and Sirius has now stomped on Remus’ entrance for the third time in a row.

“What, you want to say that a bit louder?” Sirius snaps, bristled, violin down from his neck and rested heavily on his knee as though it’s a haughty boy-king’s scepter of some sort. He notices Remus roll his eyes across from him and whips Remus a sharp glare. “Can I help you?”

Remus raises an eyebrow and checks his watch, something that shouldn’t seem so cruel but rips into Sirius’ guts like an insult. “Yeah, pay attention to the fucking rests.”

“Guys,” Peter says, perhaps with a sort of a warning tone to it of one squints (perhaps this is why he always has trouble with keeping a classroom under control). Sirius ignores him.

“Are we keeping you from something, maestro?” Rueful satisfaction twists through Sirius’ guts as he watches Remus frown at him.

“If you’re going to be a bitch about this then I have excerpts to run that would be a hell of a lot better use of my time.”

“Guys!” James speaks up this time, scooting his chair forward slightly to shriek just so against the linoleum floor and make Sirius wince with the violent tang of the sound. “We only have the room for ten more minutes, can we not draw blood ‘til then?”

Sirius clenches his jaw and leans back in his chair, hardly aware that he’d leaned forward at all, and replaces his violin beneath his chin. “I can if Lupin can.”

“Oh, fuck off—”

_ “Hey.” _ James does that thing where, somehow, his voice takes on a fatherly pitch that makes the deeper corners of Sirius’ stomach dropped with the learned tendency to fear paternal fury. Sirius lets out a low, furious breath through his nose (honestly why is he so upset? Why is his fuse so short these days?  _ Gideon, _ he decides, fuck that asshole and his fucking mindgames). Remus mutters something to himself that Sirius holds himself back from commenting on. A spell of uncomfortable quiet hits the room like a gas canister, through which Sirius can clearly feel James giving him a Look.

“We’ll take it back to rehearsal fifteen, then?”

Pete’s attempt at chipper ignorance is admirable, if transparent. The other three grumble varying degrees of  _ Sure _ and ready their instruments like surgical tools to excise some sort of synergy from all the stress of a very long semester around them.

Eventually they hammer out a sort-of-maybe-almost solid run of the first movement—quite lovely if one had been listening through the door, but if one had watched them play they would have seen the strange unevenness in the way none of their breathing matched up, no one was watching anyone besides their music, and their bow strokes were a harry of awfully sloppy apprehension.

“Pete, beer at Maxi’s?” James flicks his violin case shut with what seems like a very poorly-covered dose of relief at being done with the hour-and-a-half just past.

“Hell yeah. Sirius? Remus?” Pete looks between the two of them tucking away their own instruments, wagging a pair of finger-guns that would look weirdly forced on anyone besides the man who goes by Mr. P and teaches the best damn recorder solos this side of the Mississippi (self-proclaimed).

Remus laughs once to himself—Sirius doesn’t let his guts clench at how nice it sounds, he really, truly doesn’t—and hoists his cello case onto one shoulder. “Thanks, but nope. Need to practice.”

“Audition?” James glows a bit with the Potter-brand pride of people he cares about doing cool shit. Sirius has always been a little jealous about that. Remus nods.

“Two; Indianapolis on Saturday, Madison on Monday.”

“How do you convince your classes to be so chill with you taking time off?” The words are out of Sirius’ mouth before he remembers he and Remus are being bitter with one another. He looks up and sees Remus looking back at him with a bit of a tight-lipped expression, one that says  _ I’m not done being annoyed with you yet. _ Sirius holds in the embarrassed stain of a flush he knows wants to fight its way onto his cheeks.

“I don’t have classes on Mondays,” Remus says with a twitchy little half-shrug, reminding Sirius likely for the umpteenth time of yet another one of the small things that tend to go in one of Sirius’ ears and out the other. He’s in the doorway and waving his farewell as Sirius fights with his tongue knotting up to impudently refuse apology. “Wish me luck.” It’s likely the last time he’ll see any of them before the weekend except in passing through the halls, as he doesn’t share classes with anyone besides James on Tuesdays.

They all crow their own version of good fortune at Remus, who doesn’t turn around to accept it; Sirius’ turns out to be a pale little croak of “G’luck.”  _ Goddammit. _

“So, beer?”

Sirius looks up at Pete, watching him expectantly and nodding at Sirius’ violin case as if to hurry him along. Sirius snorts and finally lets a Fuck It smile curl its way onto his mouth.

“Yeah, sure.”

Bundled up with their instruments under their arms, scarves and coats bound tight, Pete’s backpack still unzipped until Sirius yanks it shut for him, the three of them face the dark streets of campus in mid-week nighttime buzz. Sirius feels just a bit emptied without Remus along with them, even though one, he would never admit to that, and two, Remus hardly ever comes with them to get beer (perish the thought that they turn into the best times Sirius has in recent memory when Remus  _ does _ come along). He stays himself from glancing over his shoulder at the yellow glow of top-floor practice rooms behind them in the music building and lights a cigarette with one hand as he walks.

Maxi’s is vibrant and alive with upperclassmen, graduate students, and the odd professor when Sirius, James, and Pete approach, tucked into its side of the main campus walk like an oasis amid the season. Sirius has always enjoyed the atmosphere of mostly-not-music-majors, surrounded only by whomever it is he’s decided to come with and a whole throng of strangers. Occasionally another one of them will wave, almost sheepish, from the edge of the bar or the back corner of tables, but nine times out of ten Sirius doesn’t know who they are on first glance. Very few people at this fucking school have ever mattered to him very much.

As if in protest to the eddying restlessness in his head, Sirius’ phone pings from his coat pocket as James sets the pint of cheap-piss beer down in front of Sirius in its cloudy glass. Sirius distractly joins the “Cheers!” Pete starts, always starts, that’s His Thing lately, as though he’s just a bit desperate to cling to the ephemeral reality of their friendship—does Pete really thing they’ll stop hanging out after their ensemble credit is through? Nonsense, really, although the pit of Sirius’ heart thrums doubtfully to remember the very real threat of he and Remus tearing one another’s proverbial throats out for some reason these days—

Sirius almost bites down around the rim of his glass, frustration crawling up through his teeth, when he glances down and sees the message on his phone display:

**_Gid:_ ** _ mine in 10? _

He curses under his breath and eyes his beer for a second longer than normal. James notices. “You good?”

“I—yeah, it’s. Whatever.” Sirius  _ chik _ ’s his screen asleep again and swallows a deep draught of beer.  _ Fucking Gideon.  _ James starts in on a story that’s vaguely overblown but still endearing because it’s coming from James, and Sirius pretends to listen while his insides war with self-denial and self-pity and self-hatred and all the thrilling-fun self-destructive things that come from growing up in a household in which children are taught nothing about their self-worth besides the way to properly hold a bow and precisely when not to tell the adults exactly what they’re feeling.

_ Bzzt. _

“Motherf—sorry, James, no, go on.” Sirius waves an encouraging if yet distracted hand as James pauses his story, waking his phone again just beneath the lip of the table to see the screen preview. Oh, it’s Gideon alright, his best asset on display at full attention, framed perfectly in a very flattering shot with his fist wrapped around its base and the tip practically begging to be touched. Sirius feels his pulse jump in his wrist as well as his trousers.  _ Shit. _

He swipes open his messages with a fluent thumb and taps out his response with quick pecking taps:

_ sure, be there in 5 _

Fucking, fucking, fucking shit. Sirius wishes he could control himself as he stands up, weaves a sorry little apology, “Group project imploded for media studies, yeah, it’s bullshit, hate them too, yup, we should do something Saturday, catch you later.”

Back out into the cold, hands jammed into his pockets (there’s a little hole in one he needs to mend but knows he fucking won’t, never does, just buys a new coat, isn’t that how it always works?), Sirius lights another cigarette as he stalks northward to Gideon’s shitty walkup apartment, poor heating and all, frustration boiling thick in his guts.

They’re supposed to be broken up. They’ve  _ been _ broken up for two weeks now, and yet they’ve fucked three times since then. Try as he might, Sirius Black has no fucking self-control.

Out into the dark of another bad decision, Sirius promises himself that he’ll make things better. He’ll quit thinking of the used-to-be’s, quit imagining the portrait of Remus shutting himself for hours in those fucking practice rooms, quit forcing himself to make a fucking plan after the springtime that still, thankfully, feels leagues and leagues away.

He’ll make things better, he insists with a violent exhale of smoke at the busy Broad Street crosswalk. He always does.

Doesn’t he?


	2. Mvt II - Presto fantastico

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving break looms, tensions rise, and Sirius bites down on fury like a fucking belt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Largest love to [lecheesie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeCheesie/pseuds/LeCheesie) for a whippin' good beta read on this one.
> 
> If you've ever cried in a bank of practice rooms late at night, this one's for you <3

_“The position of the bow on the string will affect the resonance of an instrument. Playing with the bow close to the bridge (_ sul ponticello _), chiefly used_ tremolando _, produces a metallic sound; playing on the finger-board (_ sul tasto, flautando _) creates a full, veiled effect.”_

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, _Principles of Orchestration_

—

“You wanna explain what that was?”

Sirius yanks on one leg of his jeans and passes the poorly-packed bowl back to Gideon without looking at him on the other side of the mattress. He holds the smoke in (lungs burning just a bit, he doesn’t smoke unless he’s with Gideon, this will turn into an awful headache in about an hour but Gideon himself is the bigger fucking headache right now) until he bunches up the other leg and pulls it on as well, standing to shimmy the waistband up and finally exhale. “Well, when two idiots get fucking horny and have kept falling back together for weeks like goddamn dominoes after breaking u—”

“Thanks, Oscar Wilde, I know what a fucking booty call is. I mean _that,_ the ending.” The _skitch_ of Gideon’s lighter scratches out as he takes another hit. Sirius has always looked askance at singers who smoke, and Gideon is no exception. He draws his lips into a tight line and hunts for his shirt amid the twisted sheets. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” Oh, he knows. 

Sirius had been in to the hilt, Gideon finished and boneless, coaxing Sirius on with hot little panting huffs of encouragement, hitting his limit, tired, frustrated, ready to burst and just enjoy the high of coming—

And it was Remus’ name that came out in a half-choked gasp.

Gideon snorts to yank Sirius out of embarrassed remembrance. It’s a bitter sound, an ugly sound, something Sirius would expect coming from an angry art student instead of somebody who’s been cast to play the boyish and adoring Lensky in this semester’s production of _Eugene Onegin._ “Of course you don’t. You know he doesn’t fuck, don’t you?”

Sirius pauses with a sudden and unexpected fury bolting through him. He finds his shirt by the twist of sheets around Gideon’s right foot and snatches up the wrinkled lump. “Who says?” _And what the fuck is wrong with that anyways?_ He wants to amend, but knows it would fall flat on Gideon’s one-track compulsion for existence itself rooted entirely in fucking, smoking, and singing.

“Avery and Fenwick.” _Skitch,_ another hit down. Sirius trains his expression away from a glare and doesn’t quite look directly at Gideon as he wrestles the shirt onto his forearms. “Ben tried to hit on him at the last orchestra party and apparently Lupin looked at him like he had the fucking plague. You can do better than him, you know. You just _did_ better.”

It shocks Sirius, just a little, to feel the distilled contempt in him that flares in his guts with the plain derision on Gideon’s face. Gideon has, as an objective fact, the face of a demigod—perfectly symmetrical, faint freckles in all the right spots, hair redder than copper and eyes bluer than lapis; he’ll go on to charm audiences in Germany and Italy and the whole rest of Europe some day, leaving behind the imagined canker of American arts after graduating. It is another objective fact (and Sirius knows this painfully well while still putting up with it because he’s only just tripped into his twenties and good sex is good sex) that Gideon Prewett is an unrivaled asshole. That combined with his talent and his looks will take him to the stars and beyond onstage. But in this moment, as he tugs his shirt down over his head, Sirius decides he’s had enough of it.

“What, you think _you’re_ better?”

Shit. Sirius is mad. That means Gideon will be mad too in a matter of seconds, the motherfucker feeds on emotions like blood. Gideon narrows his eyes and takes another long, slow hit from his bowl.

“Compared to some gangly twink who looks like he hasn’t slept in fifty years? Uh, fucking yeah. You’re way beyond him and you know it.” Gideon stretches his hands behind his head and raises an eyebrow at Sirius, there across the floor in awkward rumple-dressedness in comparison to Gideon’s uncaring and perfect nakedness. Sirius’ mouth tastes sour. Jealousy is one of the few things that doesn’t fit Gideon like a well-tailored suit.

“Don’t put words in my fucking mouth,” Sirius hisses. He snatches his keys and wallet up from the floor where they fell in his haste to shuck his jeans not half an hour ago and crams them back into his pockets.

Gideon blows smoke like silver threads and Sirius feels regret pressing a stone into his stomach. He’s never going to do this again, no matter how alluring Gideon is making himself look on that glorified futon wearing nothing but his bedclothes. Unknowingly sealing the end of their meetups, Gideon rolls his eyes and shrugs. “I’m right.”

“Sure,” Sirius says through his teeth. “Fine. Now I remember why I broke up with you. Don’t fucking call me again.”

“Oh come on, you drama queen, I’m trying to _help you._ Lupin doesn’t _fuck,_ and you can’t go six fucking days wi—”

 “Don’t. Fucking. Call me. Again.”

Sirius’ voice is low, but it’s a rare moment in which he dredges up every ounce of his mother’s leftovers swimming around in the fairly caustic soup of his personality. Gideon twists his face into confused discomfort, backlit by offense and underscored by badly-tuned disgust. “Fine then, fuck you.”

“Wish you never had,” Sirius spits, a lie but it cuts in the way Sirius needs to save his ego at the moment, yanking on his coat while he salutes Gideon and all the brief time spent with him in a succinct and satisfying middle finger. Gideon says something disgusting and horribly offensive, no doubt, under his breath, but Sirius is already on his way out of the room and down the steps before he can hear it. Emmeline is in the living room (ever the patient and pretending-not-to-hear-the-headboard roommate) when Sirius bangs out the front door, not stopping to say goodbye or catch the way the double-bassist’s eyebrows shoot up in expected exasperation.

 _Fuck you,_ Sirius thinks to the lingering phantom of Gideon’s opinion, bitter and constant, all the way through the walk west back to the SEPTA station that will take him south and back to the comfortable loneliness of his apartment. _Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you if you think there’s anything on this fucking planet better than him._

—

“Who pissed in your cereal, Pete?”

Sirius balks when Peter looks up at him with an unbecoming glare, only to soften immediately when he sees the surprise sprawled over Sirius’ face. “Sorry,” Peter mumbles, stuffing something that looks more than a little bit important into a bifold folder deep in his backpack. “My placement sucks. I’m stressed.”

“Defeated again by the third-graders?” James pipes up from his chair in front of his music, plucking softly at his D-string as he twists its peg with careful concentration. Pete glowers at himself and flips open the latches on his instrument case.

“Fifth-graders,” he says with dark heaviness. James and Sirius make vague sounds of agreement.

Sirius’ phone buzzes, and he glances at it expecting an email notification. His insides twist when he sees the recently-changed contact name on his screen instead:

 **_don’t do it you fucken weakling_ ** _: free in an hourish? wanna talk_

Sirius clenches his jaw ( _Don’t grind your teeth, you’ve been really good about that lately)_ —Gideon’s version of “talk,” even when they were still together, has always ended with Gideon on his knees and as smug a smile as one can manage with his mouth wrapped around someone’s dick. He ignores it, setting instead to examining his bow hairs very, very closely. “Hey, what are you and Lily doing for Thanksgiving?” he asks James, perhaps a bit too loudly but not so out of place from their normal pre-rehearsal chatter that either James or Pete comments on it.

“Spending it with her family, so that’ll be interesting.” James raises his eyebrows once, a short little jump of expression. “Apparently her sister is bringing a pretty serious boyfriend, so at least I’ll have someone to interrogate over cranberry sauce.”

“Don’t think it’ll be the other way around?” Pete looks purposefully at James overtop of his music stand as he sits down. James pulls a face.

“You’re looking at the one who single-handedly saved the turkey from a fiery grave last year, you really think _I’m_ the one who gets interrogated? Mrs. Evans might as well have sainted me right there in the kitchen.”

“Patron saint of fuckery,” Sirius says over his shoulder, feeling the familiar easement of joking just as his phone decides to ping again:

 **_don’t do it you fucken weakling_ ** _: we can also just skip right to fucking, if that’s what gets u over here_

Sirius bites his lips together and lets a slow breath out from his nose, fury at the end of its leash deep in his stomach. He chucks his phone into his case and shuts it soundly. James laughs for nothing but raucous confirmation of the title, thankfully only able to look at Sirius’ back.

Although timing, ever the _real_ saint of fuckery, brings Remus straight through the door to see Sirius glaring at his case. “All good?” He asks, perfectly civil and even with a little spring in his step, and yet Sirius’ heart is already afire with all the bullshit passions of feeling in general so of course, of _course,_ he frowns in reply.

“Not really.” Sirius says it sharply by accident, a soft hiss as though his body is desperate to find commiseration with somebody besides James and Pete joking about turkey stuffing behind him, but he fucks it up ( _What’s new?_ he thinks, sneering to himself, always self-destructing like this lately) and makes it far more angry than it needs to be. Remus frowns, clearly taken aback, and looks more than a little hurt by Sirius’ sharpness.

“Hey!” Pete smiles at Remus when he notices the entrance, thankfully oblivious to the strange skittering snap of something between him and Sirius.

“Hey.” Remus quirks a pale half-smile as he sits to unpack his cello beside his chair to set up just a bit more fastidious than usual.

“Off to Boston soon, yeah?” James asks, shuffling his music around while Remus screws out his endpin with quick fingers. Sirius takes up his violin and lowers himself into his own chair, tidily not looking straight in Remus’ direction.

“Yeah, got any extra scarves for me to bring?” Remus looks relieved when James gives him a chuckle in return, and the small little tick of relaxation that eases Remus’ furrowed brow makes Sirius feel like an entire fucking idiot. “I probably won’t get very far, but it’s good practice.”

“You say that,” Pete says sagely, double-checking his tuning with short little skiffs of his bow along his strings, “and then next thing we know you’ll be carting yourself up there with a new job while we’re all stuck down here waving at you.”

Sirius’ heart tugs sharply at the very sudden thought of losing Remus, a thought he hasn’t let himself sit on very much at all. He finds immediately that he hates it; a sheet of his music leaps off the stand as if in dramatic resistance to the idea, and he scrambles noisily to pick it up. Blushing for no reason, Sirius doesn’t look up when he hears Remus pause before sniffing a polite little laugh at Pete’s encouragement. “Thanks, but I’ll hold off on any grand plans ‘til I know for sure. Shall we?”

“Hold on,” Sirius mumbles, re-setting his music in a jumble with the neck of his violin and his bow in the same fist. James shimmies to the front of his chair, running a cataloguing thumb over the dog-eared edges of his own music, and tucks his instrument under his chin.

“Ten, nine, eight—” James begins with a mock-announcer voice as Sirius clambors with his music. Sirius’ frustration boils over, at an all-time limit for the last several days, and whirls to face James with a sharp snarl.

“I said _hold on!”_

The shout echoes shortly in the empty classroom for several seconds, Pete and James’ eyes wide with confused offense while Sirius feels both embarrassment and the disappointed weight of Remus’ stare on him at once. He swallows thickly, finally shuffling the last page into place. “Sorry. Let’s start.”

“You okay?” Pete’s voice is tentative, and Sirius bites down on the compulsion to snap again.

“I’m fine.”

James holds his gaze for another moment, concern netting around Sirius like sticky webbing. “Yeah?” he murmurs, the unsaid invitation for Sirius to open up laid plain on the floor before him. It’s tempting to take the brotherly offer, but at the last minute Sirius tosses his head and tucks a long strand of hair behind his ear in anxious preoccupation.

“Yeah. Let’s start.” _Goddammit._

They dive into the Myaskovsky like a comfortable pool, but it’s evident as they reach the second movement that their communication is completely off. Sirius is reluctant to admit to himself that it’s his fault as they canter through the Presto, but he’s at least fifty percent of the problem. Their tempo is about one-and-a-half times too fast when they hit Sirius’ hectic rushing at the _più pesante_ , everyone is stomping on one another’s entrances because of it, James’ breathing cues are being ignored in favor of everyone trying to keep hold of their own part, and even the _meno mosso_ feels like a neurotic mess for the smatter of everyone’s compulsion to either pull or push at the rhythms.

Shit. It’s all Sirius’ fucking fault, as it feels most things are nowadays.

After taking the recapitulation of the movement three different times in catastrophic failures, James rips his violin out from under his chin and glares at Sirius. “Slow the fuck down and quit pushing us, are your fingers on fire?”

“Keep the fuck up, I’m playing it just as fast as it should be!” Sirius snaps back, a lie, but it feels better to pin it on someone else than it does to admit that he’s wrong. It always has.

“No you aren’t, you’re rushing,” Remus says, stoney and openly glaring when Sirius moves to frown at him in turn. Sirius had watched him frantically matching the tempo with his answer of Sirius’ statement and knew it was too fast, but something aimlessly vindictive about making Remus fumble on the instrument he usually has so tame in his hands has struck flint in his chest.

“Then keep up.”

A muscle in Remus’ jaw flutters with Sirius’ petulance, and James heaves a sigh. “Sirius, just slow down. From the top.”

Sirius’ bow hold tightens. Oh, _now_ he’s pissed. If it had been September or even just early October he probably wouldn’t be so furious and ready to draw proverbial blood right now, but as it stands the stress of the semester and every auxiliary piece of bullshit floating up with the approaching holiday breaks and looming final term has him thirsty for conflict. And the one thing Sirius has always been exceedingly good at besides pulling talent out of thin air is causing conflict without even trying.

“Slow DOWN,” Remus shouts over the music as he enters another too-fast answer to Sirius’ _pesante_ statement.

“Keep up, Boston,” Sirius snaps. 

 _“Sirius,”_ James cuts in, but the damage is already done. Sirius glances up from his music at Remus and sees anger burning high and hot in his face, his body wrapped around his cello like another spine as he coaxes out melody and harmony both as though slamming sonic hoofbeats into the air, why is he complaining then if he can keep up so well? He’s flying through the music and it sounds _fine,_ Sirius doesn’t feel like he’s rushing so why should—

A dark-wooded _chak_ snaps out from Remus’ cello. “FUCK!”

Their playing stops dead, and for a sickening moment Sirius thinks the instrument is cracked. Thankfully it’s just Remus’ A string that flops in half, snapped at the nut as the only apparent damage. Sirius’ heart slowly slips back down out of his throat. “It’s just a string—”

“No, fuck you, Sirius!” Remus’ yell is even more sudden than the breaking string, smacking into Sirius on a blindside, gesturing sharply with his bow; “Now I have to go to a fucking audition with a fresh fucking string, are you fucking proud of yourself?”

Sirius clenches his jaw and swallows, glancing over at James for something, confirmation, comfort, anything, only to be met with a flat look of disappointment. “It’s—just a string, you can replace it,” he says with a snide shrug.

Remus scoffs, slamming his bow down onto the lip of his stand and shaking his head. “You fucking would be alright with going into an audition after breaking in a new string. God, you’re _so fucking_ —whatever. I’m done for tonight, sorry James, I need to fix this and practice.”

Sirius bristles as James gives a resigned wave of approval for Remus to stand abruptly and stalk over to his instrument case. “I’m so fucking _what,_ Remus?”

“You’re so fucking YOU!” Remus shouts, throwing out a furious hand out in front of him. His face is twisted into a snarl, outrage Sirius hasn’t ever really seen on him before, and he’s taken aback by the ferocity. “You skate by like this every fucking time, and you can’t understand when anyone else runs into anything the _least_ bit difficult! Do us all a favor and quit throwing yourself into the center of everything for _one fucking second,_ can you do that?!”

“I _skate by?”_ Sirius roars, “I sit first in the fucking orchestra, Remus, you think that’s fucking _easy?_ Good luck landing a job if you think it’s peaches and fucking cream—”

“Oh, fuck you!”

“SHUT THE HELL UP!”

James’ old lacrosse captain voice cuts through the room like a knife, quieting both Sirius and Remus in an instant. Sirius’ pulse is hard and hot and high behind his ears, fogging his hearing, absorbing such open rage from Remus that he can hardly stand to sit in one spot. James glares between both of them while Pete sits with his viola on his knee, staring at all of them as though someone has pulled a gun. 

“Remus, go. Have a good audition, we’ll see you next week. Sorry about your string. Sirius, shut up and quit antagonizing him,” James says with low, trained patience.

Sirius’ nostrils flare. “I’m not antagonizing him! He—”

“You sound like a fucking child, Sirius, STOP IT!” James doubles down on him with such alacrity that the part of Sirius eternally afraid of his father rises up and quashes the fight left in him. He hunkers back down into his chair, slamming his music folder shut on his stand and not caring when his pencil goes skittering across the floor.

Tense quiet takes over the classroom while Remus packs up quickly, slings his instrument case over his shoulder after several moments, and leaves without a final farewell to shut the door heavily behind him. Sirius sags at that, and James fixes him with a stern glare while Peter watches uneasily.

“What the fuck, dude,” James hisses, “you _know_ he’s stressed.”

“We’re all stressed!” Sirius insists, standing up to start hectically packing up his own case. He can practically _hear_ James roll his eyes.

“Auditions make everything worse,” he says evenly. Sirius scoffs.

“He’s not the only one taking auditions, James, Pete took a bunch last spring and nobody got into a shouting match then.”

“I didn’t take any of them as seriously as he did though, Remus is way different,” Pete says with a warning tone. Sirius looks over his shoulder and glares.

“What the fuck is this, shit on Sirius hour?” He snaps. James narrows a stare at him.

“What’s your problem? Are you still tangled up with Prewett? He’s been treating you like shit and you always take it out on us, and that isn’t—”

“It isn’t any of your fucking business, is what it isn’t,” Sirius snarls. He sees another several messages from _Speak of the devil,_ who else, and shoves his phone into his pocket without even unlocking the screen to skim any of them. He shunts the last reserves of his patience into laying his violin carefully into its hold and wiping it down with his dust cloth.

“It isn’t _fair,_ Sirius,” Pete clarifies. Sirius pauses. A very small part of him is impressed with the strength in Pete’s voice. It makes him take a breath, a rarity when he gets thrown into such violent spins of emotion.

“You should apologize to him,” James says. There’s a hint of something knowing in his voice, but Sirius’ pride overthrows the compulsion to dig into that any deeper. “You know how he tends to hang onto stuff that bothers him, you don’t want that to throw off his audition.”

Sirius’ mutinous memories scrape back to sophomore year, the springtime of Remus’ gamut of young artist program auditions so ahead of the curve that Sirius had thought it ridiculous that he was already trying for spots at places like Glimmerglass, Whitefish, Santa Fe, and all sorts of different repertory ballets. At the height of those preparations, Remus had stumbled into and, fortunately for Sirius’ confused heart but unfortunately for Remus’ own stability, out of a brief fling with a dance major, which then resulted in a very deep low point that saw him rejected from all but one program and very intensely reserved for the rest of the semester.

It had gutted Sirius, in a way that he hadn’t been entirely reflect on at the time. Presently, his heart pulls and he heaves a sigh worthy of a westerly gale. “Fuck. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no skin off my nose, go apologize to Remus.”

As always, James is infuriatingly right.

Sirius stalks the practice rooms, violin in tow and bag slung over one shoulder, for several minutes along several rows on several floors before he finds Remus. He almost misses it for the mess of tuning disrupting his ear over the point-blank refusal to look in through the thin vertical windows lest Remus catch a glimpse of him and refuse to open the door, but then Sirius hears it: the Verdi.

Even seated in just one instrument, Remus’ tone is so painfully rich and perfectly beautiful that Sirius needs to consciously keep himself from tripping over his feet when he stops in the middle of the hallway. The muting of the poorly-insulated door seams and the racket of other students practicing does nothing to dull its singular glimmer, the shine of honed talent slicing into Sirius’ viscera like a scalpel—Sirius shuts his eyes briefly and gives himself leave to simply listen for a handful of seconds while he takes pains to peel back his defenses in preparation for an apology. He can almost hear the vocal melody sinking into his ears over top of Remus’ cello like a warm bath; _Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae/libera animas omnium fidelum/defunctorum de poenis inferni/et profondo lacu; libera eas de ore leonis/ne absorbeat eas tartarus/ne cadant in obscurum._

Sirius is, has been, and always will be the one who puts himself in the darkest, bleakest obscurity of his own fucking lion’s mouth.

When he knocks, it’s more tentative that Sirius means it to be. He squares his shoulders a little and sets his violin down by his feet, and it’s a few hesitant and maddening seconds before the door swings open steadily. Remus looks at him with a doubtful expression, and Sirius feels his heart’s immediate desperation to throw itself on the floor at Remus’ feet by way of Sirius’ traitorous mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. For once, it isn’t hidden behind a mile of steel walls built up around his heart (more than slightly terrifying)—he hopes the earnesty of it bleeds through at least a bit, and Sirius casts his eyes straight into Remus’ own for what feels like an eternity before Remus sags just enough to show his surrender.

Rubbing his thumb absently along the cracking paint at the edge of the door, Remus sighs to himself. “It’s okay. I’m sorry for calling you a slacker.”

“It—no, don’t worry. I do, sort of. Slack.” Relief doesn’t even begin to cover what Sirius feels ease into his veins, but he covers the flow of it by leaning against the door jamb. He quirks a comisserative half-smile at Remus’ open cello case. “I feel really shitty about the string.”

“Ah, it’ll be fine. I was just...heated. It’s less than ideal, but I’ll play fine by Saturday,” Remus says with an errant wave of his hand. He waffles for a moment in silence, staring down at the carpet before he glances back up at Sirius. Worry swims around in his eyes, and Sirius braces himself marginally for what he’s drawing breath to say. “I, uh. James told me about you and Gideon.”

“Oh, the breakup?” Sirius thumbs one of the buttons on his coat in nervous habit, huffing a tight little laugh. “That’s old news, it’s—I’m fine.”

Remus bites the tip of his tongue and seems to hesitate before he shakes his head with a little twitch. “No, that you’ve—you two are kind of on again? Off again? I—” He seems to decide against saying something and shakes his head again, looking down at the ground, as Sirius’ stomach flips. “Nevermind, it’s nothing. Nevermind.”

“No, hey,” Sirius leans in slightly, tipping his head to the side and lowering his eyebrows. “What’s up?” His heart picks up. _What does James know besides the obvious?_

Remus glances over his shoulder at his instrument as though it’s feeding him advice, _Who knows, maybe it is._ He pauses and shuts his eyes briefly with a tension in his posture one could probably feel strung through the whole building if they listened closely enough.

“I think the reason I’ve been so testy lately is because I have a thing for you,” he blurts in one breath.

Sirius’ oxygen leaves him in a rush, punched through the gut by a fucking hurricane. _“What?”_

A deep flush has begun staining Remus’ neck from the collar upward, and Sirius is addled by the charm of it atop his general hectic scrambling for reality. “I’m not repeating myself,” he insists, hoarse-voiced and worrying at the edge of the door again, “but that’s what it’s been. So, I guess sorry for being a shit because I got my own hopes up. I have to practice now, I—”

“No-no-no, we’re talking about this.” Sirius has straightened like an overtuned string despite feeling terribly oxygen-deprived (can the human body drop like a spiraling airplane? Let’s find out, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there). “How long?”

Remus has set his jaw and has begun shutting the door. “We can talk about this later, I—”

Sirius blanches. “No, we’ll talk about this _now_ —”

“I don’t owe you anything Sirius,” Remus murmurs, the tone of it laced with more exhaustion than any sort of malice. “I have to run excerpts and break in my string, I have my aud—”

“When will you _not_ have an audition!” Sirius throws out a hand to stop the door shutting, his entire chest aching with the sweet, maddening tang of need when Remus looks at him with a worried scowl. He swallows, struggling to find the thread of his argument when he drops it with those heart-clumsy inner fingers of his; “You—you’re always going places. You’re never here.”

He doesn’t intend for it to come out with such lame desperation, but Remus softens slightly for it. “Senior year,” he says with irony so thick it almost has a smell to it, a lame shrug tossing those sharp-angled shoulders of his in a shallow jump. “Gotta find a job.”

Sirius swallows, forgetting to reply with his own wry smile. Most of his mind is still stuck on the idea of Remus wanting him—thinking of him, watching _him,_ seeing _him_ while Sirius wasted that time trying to figure himself out too thoroughly—that Sirius can hardly think straight. “You could have told me,” he says lamely. Remus furrows his eyebrows in a shape that sort of looks like pity. Sirius wants to stroke them with his thumbs.

“Could I have though?”

“I—yes! You absolutely could have, Remus, what the hell?”

Remus chews on the corner of his bottom lip and stares at the floor past Sirius’ feet. “You’ve always been...far away, to me.” He pauses, and Sirius feels himself holding his breath as he waits for Remus to hand-pick his words; “Since freshman year, it’s been the same shit keeping me back. You’re louder, smarter, taller, funnier, more successful with—less effort, etcetera, all of that. Can you blame me?”

Sirius looks him full in the eyes and wants to say _Yes I Certainly Can_ so badly it hurts his lungs, but he knows Remus is right. Sirius has made himself unreachable since he first stepped foot on campus, since _fucking freshman year,_ holding himself away from anything and anyone that could come close to sating Sirius deeper than instant gratification (as though there could ever be anyone who fits the job better than Remus, what a laugh). Sirius Black has never had to work at his talents much harder than blinking at them every now and again a single day in his life—violin is easy as breathing, landing a lay has been as simple as making eyes at the right person in the right corner of a party, passing classes is nothing but the act of showing up and shitting out a paper or an analysis every several days. Winning Remus over properly would have taken work, and it’s a very sudden and painful recognition that hits Sirius right behind his heart that he’s woefully underprepared, even now, to start that work in earnest. He clenches his jaw, a sudden and unbidden lump clenching the base of his throat, and shakes his head. “No,” he croaks.

There’s a flash of sadness that shudders up behind Remus’ eyes at that, and a strangely tense moment shimmers in the space between them for several ticks. Somebody’s Leonore no. 3 excerpt flutters through the walls several doors down, and Sirius’ insides turn ruefully at the jest of it— _No fucking rescue to come here, looks like I already dug my own grave, thanks._

Eventually, Remus lowers his hand to fuss tightly with the handle of the door. “I have to practice, Sirius,” he murmurs. It sounds ominously like a goodbye. Sirius blinks quickly, appalled at the prickling along his eyelashes that seems to be rising on its own, and doesn’t glance up to look Remus in the eye.

“Sure, yeah. See you at ensemble next week.”

“Yeah.”

Sirius backs up, taking his hand back from the door, and fighting the push of unwanted tears so forcefully that his voice comes out a bit too cotton-thick; “It—have a good audition, break a leg.”

Remus begins easing the door shut such that when Sirius glances up in hapless command of his compulsions all he sees is the edge of Remus’ shoulder. “Thanks,” Remus says, curt, quiet, just before the door clicks shut to seal him off in the strange quiet of soundproofed concentration.

Sirius leans his back against the wall, well away from the view through the door, and slumps down into a miserable sit. Thank fuck it’s past eleven at night and the only other people left in the building are the sort that Sirius doesn’t care about impressing, because a little well of tears springs from the corner of his eyes before he can stop it.

Verdi bleeds out from the seams of Remus’ door again, a melody so golden-soft and full of latent light that Sirius can hardly bear to listen, as Sirius tips his head back against the wall, shuts his eyes, and lets himself mourn his own requiem (just enough, just a bit) for every missed opportunity he’s managed to ignore throughout the last four years all trussed up in one package by the name of Remus Lupin.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy, keep your eyes (and ears!) peeled for the next chapter :>  
> Feel free to [find me on tumblr](https://chromat1cs.tumblr.com/) and come say hi if you'd like!


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